


st. augustine in red lipstick

by loki (lokigurl)



Category: Roswell (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-29
Updated: 2011-05-29
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokigurl/pseuds/loki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Act of Hope</p><p>For your mercies' sake, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul: "I am your salvation." So speak that I may hear, O Lord; my heart is listening; open it that it may hear you, and say to my soul: "I am your salvation." After hearing this word, may I come in haste to take hold of you. Hide not your face from me. Let me see your face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it. The house of my soul is too small to receive you; let it be enlarged by you. It is all in ruins; do you repair it. There are thing in it - I confess and I know - that must offend your sight. But who shall cleanse it? Or to what others besides you shall I cry out? From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord, and from those of others spare your servant. Amen.</p><p>- Saint Augustine of Hippo</p></blockquote>





	st. augustine in red lipstick

_  
DEAR fucking god, she thinks, rolling over and pulling the blanket over her head. her eyes won't open and her muscles ache and she's so damn tired of doing this over and over again. she wants a way back, a way home and she wants out but she knows what that would mean. and right now she doesn't feel like dealing with that.  
_

 

Maria can't breathe beneath the covers so she throws them back again. Inharmonic snoring erupts around the room and she wants to get up, take a walk outside. Get away from the stale air, humid and wrought with everyone's sweaty personal aroma. It's so thick she can almost taste it and for a moment, she tries - sticking her tongue out between her chapped lips. It tastes the same.

Nothing special, nothing different. It always tastes the same.

 

 _DEAR fucking god, she thinks and curls up in small section of the bed - it's her night on the bed, shared of course, and her fingers curl and clench the sheets between her fingers. the smell of the detergent is too strong but she doesn't care, it hides the smell of death. nothing ever changes - not that smell, not anything - and she's still in this bed, exhausted, feeling his heat, her heat against her skin like a constant reminder that this is her life now. bodies crushed into hotel rooms, napping on one another in vans._

 

Tonight she's on the bed, which she's normally grateful for, but just once it'd be really fucking nice to have it to herself. She's managed to sneak back once in a while when the others were eating, sneak into whatever motel they've holed up in and take a quick nap on the squeaky mattress. But she's got a side tonight, and even some breathing room - as if she could breathe, so she shouldn't complain. Half the time she's squeezed into the middle of two bodies and on a hot night like this it makes everything worse.

Michael pulls her back against his chest, like he always does. As if he knows she wants out and grabs her at the exact moment when she thinks she just might make a break for it. Like he can read her mind. Maria used to think he could do that, but now she knows better.

She'll wait for about five minutes and roll back to her cool spot on the pillow.

 

 _DEAR fucking god, why am i here again? she wonders as last night's dinner rolls around in her stomach. the first meal she could eat in days. when she was six she was running around like princess penelope, ruler of the treehouse and friend to mice everywhere. she didn't care that the treehouse was falling apart and they had to huddle on the side whenever it rained. at six years old she wasn't hiding in basements, praying that they wouldn't find her. at twenty years old, she can't imagine what she'd do when they did._

 

The van has about a hundred thousand miles on it, all put on in less than three years. Up and down each coast, across the country half a dozen times. Once they made it as far as the Yucatan in search of an artifact. Something to possibly do something for something else. She really doesn't know what because no one's really made an effort to explain it to her. Max and Liz pour over pages of symbols while Isabel and Michael try to construct weapons out of already deciphered instructions. It used to bother Maria that they wouldn't include her, but she doesn't care too much anymore.

Instead, when they do their alien thing (and it's often) Kyle pulls out the lawn chairs from the back of the van and they crack open beers. She makes him laugh and he makes her smile. Maria presses the cold can against her skin and lets the condensation drip down her cheek. If she stopped to think about it, she might be on the verge of becoming an alcoholic. She doesn't stop to think about it.

In all that time they've never been back to Roswell. The place she had always wanted to escape from. The only place she wants to be now.

 

 _dear FUCKING god, she remembers the morning when someone left a razor in the shower and it was all she could do not to slice right down to her veins. what the fuck good it would do, she didn't know, since someone would inevitably heal her and she'd go back to these long, draining days of do-gooding. or, rather, attempts at do-gooding that usually ended up failing somewhat. even when they managed to save five they lost ten - but they were only kids, what the hell did anyone expect of them?_

 

It's really tempting some mornings. Hell, it's really tempting some afternoons and evenings too. Seems like the only time it's not tempting is when they're actually running for their lives. When it would be all too easy to stop running and turn around to get the blast head-on. But she knows that they'd come back for her, and someone else would get hurt in the crossfire. Two people are harder to heal than one, and she knows that a razor slice is easier to fix than a gunshot. She knows they wouldn't let her die.

Maria hasn't been brought back from the dead yet. It's the one thing that she and Isabel share - well, not the only thing. Boundaries are blurred out here and modesty was one of the first things to be abandoned. Enough times have found them squeezed into crevices, pressed up against each other barely able to breathe. The first time they slept together, Maria spent nearly every moment comparing Isabel's soft body, soft lips to Michael's hard, calloused skin. The second time she didn't think about Michael at all. She still doesn't think about him.

Sometimes, but never with Isabel, she thinks about Max.

 

 _dear FUCKING god, her head is pounding and what she wouldn't give for a glass of water. she wants to shove him off her but she'd still have to get up to walk to the bathroom and there's no energy left in her body. someone sighs and she listens to see if they're getting up, maybe they can get her a drink and her mouth can stop sticking shut. but the sigh was just a sigh and the air conditioner kicks on and she can't hear anything over its hum._

 

Maria really wants to get up and out into the fresh air. And she'll taste it too, full well knowing that the most she can hope for is the sulfur from the plant a few miles back. She wonders if Max would follow her - wonders if he'd creep down the stairs, steadying hands on her hips, maybe brush the rough pad of his thumb just beneath the edge of her pants. He did that back in Tulsa and she nearly collapsed from the sensation. Would they find a room - maybe the laundry room, like in Miami - and would he peel off her clothes, taking brief moments to taste her salted skin?

They can't, she'd whisper, just like in Denver - not at all convincing, but they'd both known that it was wrong. Not that it hasn't happened and won't happen again, but it can't happen here - not now. Not when the room is supposed to smell a certain way and it would be so very obvious what they'd been up to.

Maria crosses her legs and slips her hand down into her underwear. Oh, but what she wouldn't give for that glass of water right now.

 

 _dear FUCKING god, can she just close her eyes and wake up somewhere else? maybe in her old bed, with her mom nudging her to shut off the alarm and get in the shower already. maybe in some alternate universe where she's never met these people and has never heard of aliens and has never experienced the deaths she's seen. maybe wake up in this same room, alone, and free to live her life and not for 'the good of all.' or perhaps not wake up at all? Just close her eyes and have it all be over, finally._

 

Once upon a time, all Maria wanted was fairytale endings with princes and princesses who lived in big old castles and rode white speckled ponies all afternoon. And she followed - chased - a boy who she knew, she just knew was her love. She so very much wanted him to be the prince who would rescue her.

She laughs, almost choking, because she knows that she is no Penelope and he is no prince. For all the talk of royalty, they're just a bunch of dirty kids fighting a war for which they're unprepared and trying to solve a problem that probably doesn't have a real solution anyway.

But they promised to fight and they've fought - sometimes winning, sometimes losing. They said they'd do this and none of them are willing to admit that they don't know what they're doing. They trudge through each day, everyone secretly wishing that someone else will finally say "enough" and they can stop running and go home. But they're all in some big game of chicken and no one is willing to say it. To admit defeat.

So they continue on, and Max and Liz keep staring at code and Michael and Isabel keep making unusable constructions out of scrap metal and Kyle and Maria keep drinking beer, wondering when it will all end.

 

 _dear fucking GOD, she prays, not for the first time, and not for the last. She's not a religious girl, but she prays every night. dear fucking GOD. She whispers under the blanket, shaking. dear fucking GOD, she begs, pleads. dear fucking GOD, the only one she can talk to in these late hours when it hurts to think, but hurts more to forget. dear fucking GOD, she asks. Please._

**Author's Note:**

> Act of Hope
> 
> For your mercies' sake, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul: "I am your salvation." So speak that I may hear, O Lord; my heart is listening; open it that it may hear you, and say to my soul: "I am your salvation." After hearing this word, may I come in haste to take hold of you. Hide not your face from me. Let me see your face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it. The house of my soul is too small to receive you; let it be enlarged by you. It is all in ruins; do you repair it. There are thing in it - I confess and I know - that must offend your sight. But who shall cleanse it? Or to what others besides you shall I cry out? From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord, and from those of others spare your servant. Amen.
> 
> \- Saint Augustine of Hippo


End file.
